[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpm74xAgvX4[/youtube] “We grow enough food to feed 10,000 people.” — Will Allen, Milwaukee, WI Growing Power is a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in all communities. Growing [...]
Filed in Green Living, News Blurbs
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Also tagged Environment, Food, Growing Power, Local Food, Milwaukee, Non-Profit, Sustainability, Urban Agriculture, Vermiculture, WI, Will Allen
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South African farmers suffered millions of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn (maize) failed to produce hardly any seeds. The plants look lush and healthy from the outside. Monsanto has offered compensation. Monsanto blames the failure of the three varieties of corn planted on these farms, in three South African provinces,on [...]
Decades of inexpensive imports — especially rice from the U.S. — punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves. While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the [...]
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Also tagged Apologies, Bill Clinton, Exports, Food Security, Free Market, Haiti, Imports, Local Food, Subsidies, Tariffs, Washington Consensus
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The coal ash industry manipulated reports and publications about the dangers of coal combustion waste, reports Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The group stated that the Environmental Protection Agency allowed the multibillon-dollar coal ash industry to have virtually unfettered access to the EPA during the Bush administration and now under President Obama. As a [...]
The certificate was only one of several that emerged from the prestigious Salon du Chocolat in Paris, the annual summit of the world’s master chocolatiers. But it may be enough to start a revolution in Peru. In October 2009, chocolate produced from the cacao beans of a small agricultural cooperative deep in one of the [...]
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Also tagged Chocolate, Coca, Cocoa, Cooperatives, Farming, Institute for Tropical Crops, ITC, Organic Food, Peru, San Martin, Tocache, USDA
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Joliet is pushing the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to more than double the concentration of cancer-causing radium it’s allowed to dump onto farmland in the south suburbs, expanding the potential for deadly radon gas in these increasingly urban communities. Radium is a naturally occurring radioactive element abundant in deep-water wells in northern Illinois and throughout [...]
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Also tagged Cancer, Chicago, Drinking Water, Environment, EPA, Health, Illinois, Joliet, Land, Radiation, Radium, Radon, Water
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Saturday, January 16, 2010
“What we have to do is very simple,” says Woody Tasch. “We have to take some of our money and invest it close to home in local food systems.” Tasch outlines his vision of sustainable investing in his recent book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. In it, [...]
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Also tagged Capitalism, Investment, Locavore, Slow Money, Slow Money Alliance, Sustainability, Sustainable Food, Values, VC, Venture Capital, Woody Tasch
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Thursday, January 14, 2010
Twenty years after the collapse of communism, the ongoing crisis of capitalism which has plunged Europe into the worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression offers a unique opportunity to chart an alternative path. In a remarkable speech (pdf), Herman Van Rompuy – the EU’s recently appointed first president – has outlined such an alternative [...]
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Also tagged Cartels, Christianity, Collectivism, Common Good, Common Wealth, Cooperation, Culture, Domestic Policy, Economics, EU, Europe, Gift Economy, Monopsony, Reform, Society, Sociology
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
For those of you wondering if we can have a more civil discourse over food and agriculture in this country, American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman has an answer for you: Fat chance! According to Stallman [MS Word], the top challenge facing farmers isn’t the rising cost of seed, fertilizer, and pesticides. Or the alarming [...]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S6kTlz6Mk4[/youtube] Geoff Lawton‘s groundbreaking implementation of permaculture in The Dead Sea Valley. This video illustrates how permaculture design techniques can restore a salt-ridden degraded landscape to a flourishing and diverse oasis. For more information about Geoff and his Permaculture work please visit: http://www.permaculture.org.au/ To find out more about the Global Permaculture movement, please visit http://www.permacultureplanet.com/
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Nearly 40 years ago, Oregon, facing an onslaught of urban sprawl, adopted the nation’s toughest land-use laws. In 1979, greater Portland became the first metropolis in the country to impose an urban-growth boundary, a hard-and-fast line beyond which suburban development is essentially banned. Along with creating dense neighborhoods, encouraging mass-transit use, and irritating free-market zealots, [...]
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Perhaps I spent too much time with developers and real estate people in my architectural career, but Hartz has said it all in Fortune, from his first comment about sopping up excess land and creating scarcity to his last quote about buying a penthouse in New York. This sure sounds like a classic real estate [...]
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Also tagged Detroit, Farming, Gardening, Green Jobs, Green Living, John Hantz, Michigan, Permaculture, Real Estate, Sustainability, Urban Agriculture
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
According to this New York Times story, atrazine causes the feminization of frogs at 0.1 parts per billion and “may be associated with birth defects, low birth weights, and menstrual problems” in women at extremely low doses, at or below the current EPA guidelines (3 parts per billion). Earlier this year I was contacted by [...]
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Also tagged Aromatase, Atrazine, Cancer, Environment, EPA, Feminization, Health, Herbicides, Letrozole, Syngenta, Tumors, Water Pollution
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Thursday, December 17, 2009
Even in Copenhagen, where agriculture is getting less attention than it arguably should be considering its impact and potential for mitigating climate change, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke about the need for research, and seeing agriculture as an opportunity for climate change mitigation. He even said to the delegates in Copenhagen, “We need [...]
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Biodiversity, Climate Change, COP15, Copenhagen, Environment, Farming, Food Safety, GMO, Monsanto, Tom Vilsack
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Corporate lobbyists (Monsanto, Royal Dutch Shell, and American Petroleum Institute) and their influence over Congress are the single greatest barrier to meaningful climate change reforms, according to Naomi Klein. Monsanto wins the Angry Mermaid award.
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Also tagged American Petroleum Institute, Big Oil, Biotechnology, Climate Change, COP15, Copenhagen, Corporatism, Deforestation, GMO, Greed, Monsanto, Naomi Klein, Opportunism, Royal Dutch Shell
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
The basic finding is that compared to pesticide use in the absence of GE crops, farmers applied 318 million more pounds of pesticides over the last 13 years as a result of planting GE seeds. This difference represents an average increase of about 0.25 pound for each acre planted to a GE trait. GE crops [...]
The fight to end hunger is being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops cannot be used in Africa, Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of software giant Microsoft, said on Thursday. Gates said GMO crops, fertilizer and chemicals are important tools — although not the only tools — to help small farms in [...]
Monday, September 28, 2009
On Friday in Capitol Hill, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis attended a press conference along with representatives of CIW and the world’s largest food service company, Compass Group, to announce that the company will pay an extra 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes that it purchases annually, with one cent per pound going directly to the [...]
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Also tagged CIW, Compass Group, DOJ, ECGP, Fair Food, Farmworkers, Florida, FTGE, Human Rights, Labor, Slavery
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Listening To
